


From The Revelation

by contraryGreymalkin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Doomed Timelines, F/F, Lovecraftian Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 07:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/671840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contraryGreymalkin/pseuds/contraryGreymalkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bad enough Vriska's trapped alone with a mentally unstable alien in a doomed timeline.  Now Rose is trying to get her to accept something worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From The Revelation

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for an HSO 2012 bonus round, for the prompt "Vriska/Rose, metafiction + Lovecraftian horror".

"We're almost up to the point, I think," says Rose, scribbling in her book, "where you go mad. I'm frightfully sorry about that."

"Huh?" You look over from your computer, where your pdfs of Mindfang's journal are glitching like crazy again. Last time they did that, it was... was... when? You can't remember. "What are you blathering about now? More of your laaaaaaaame, pointless predictions?"

"Oh no," answers Rose, looking up. She's grey again, black mist swirling around her in a way that, as usual, you try very, very hard not to let your vision eightfold resolve into shadowy tentacles. "It's merely a hazard of being a Hero of Light. The sort of understanding of probability we inescapably discover along our personal quests is bound to drive us bugfuck insane. It is a natural consequence of abruptly realising the sheer meaninglessness of fortune in the light of the game's ultimate nature."

"God, can you be any more obscure and annoying?" Oh fuck. This is one of the bad days, when she just won't stop ruining the moment with random longwinded non sequiturs that are frankly getting kind of disturbing.

"It also comes from being a tragic hero," she goes on, and oh no no no no no no no _no_ , not this again. You slam your husktop shut and march over to her, wings fluttering in agitation.

"What are you doing? I told you to stop talking to them, Lalonde, it's not _helping_!"

"Oh?" She quirks a lusus-white eyebrow, and you want to die from how adorable the movement is, but that would be the lamest death ever and you don't need to embarrass yourself in front of the only other person left in the universe who isn't a creepy squid-thing. Yet. "I didn't realise _that_ was the quadrant we were in. I apologise for my inappropriate physical advances, the-mmph!"

You have blood on your lips when you draw back. You hope grimdarkness isn't haemally transmitted, you'd rather not turn into a tentacled monstrosity like your stalkers, but Rose seems a little paler again, and pleased. "Well, then," she says with a coy smile and reaches for your hand, fingers curling around yours like tentacles and pulling you closer. "Now that you've re-established that we're not moirails, I'll be quite delighted to be tanglebuddies with you, Miss Serket, but first there is something I wish to show you."

Tanglebuddies. That's a word you can't recall her using before, though Peixes used to say it all the time so it's probably a horrorterror thing.

"Show me what? There's nothing to see in this stupid lab and outside it's all just dust and rocks and Feferi's stupid squid as far as you can see."

"Hm." She draws back a little, and regards you like an interesting lab experiment. "It seems you would benefit from some cheering up before you go mad."

Uh oh. A statement like this always leads to her pulling out the cheat codes, and she knows yours eidetically, as she proves when she leans in and presses her lips against yours, a silent request which the script demands that you oblige, ravaging her willing mouth with your tongue, and then her free arm comes up around you, her weird human warmth only increased by her body's feverish response to horrorterror possession, and for the first time you relax. You don't what this creature is that you love, how much of it is Rose and how much is Elder God and how much is something new born of the two, and you should be terrified, but you grew up in the care of something that liked you less, even if only your body was ever in danger on that front, so you can't bring yourself to care. (Sometimes you wonder if that's part of her psychic squid powers too, but that leads to infinite recursions that keep you awake all day and you hate that. No, you're pretty sure you honestly, sincerely pity the fuck out of Rose Lalonde, poor little human girl with gods in her head and no more able to escape into death than you.) But she's definitely fucking with your head, because suddenly you feel cold, and when you pull back you're surrounded by open black void instead of grey walls and metal corridors.

Or maybe she's not reading as far ahead as she thinks and you're already going mad. Who knows, maybe it's contagious.

"Come on," she says before you can protest, and she keeps whispering in your ear as she leads you over to the edge of the roof, and you flinch and shove her away.

"You know I can't speak horrorterror! Talk like a normal person!!!!!!!!"

She sighs and pulls you right up to the edge and a lesser troll might pull back, but you're a Serket, and you're not afraid of long drops. (Even after all this time, part of you still forgets you can fly, and if you fell here, your story would be over. Or epilogue, or whatever. Rose insists it's a gaiden, a side-chapter in a larger epic, a branching line that no longer matters, but you won't accept that. You won't be relegated to being a side-character.) No, it's not vertigo that makes you abruptly struggle to pull back from the edge, to flee into the safety of the lab, but Rose holds you, not just with hands now but with tentacles of black smoke, intangible but irresistable, with her dark whispers, with the burning in your blood where it mixed with hers, and you have to look.

"Come on," says Rose, still speaking grimdark but with subtitles planted in your think pan like out of those cartoons Leijon loved, and what the fuck? You signed up for a tale of classic heroism and epic caliginous rivalry when you played this game, not bad translations and - She tugs at your hand. "It's better from down there."

It's not smart. But there's a reason the pair of you aren't pale, and when she jumps, you jump, wings spread and fluttering hard to slow your fall.

Her descent is more elegant, borne on the black boiling smoke of her possession, and on impulse, when you land, you stick out your foot.

She doesn't trip, but she gives you a faint grin for the attempt, and it helps. You want to see her be silly.

John wanted that too, you think. But you never really got to ask him about it.

Then you look up at the sky again and clutch your dice so hard you can feel the points cutting into your skin.

"Isn't it beautiful?" Her hand is on your arm, soft and still burning, always burning, with that alien heat. "It's nothing to worry about, Vriska. It's actually rather enjoyable, living between pages."

"Pages..." you murmur. "Hahahahahahahaha, that's sooooooooo funny, Lalonde, I'm hysterical!" You are, but not with laughter, as you stare up as what she found for you, the darkness of the Furthest Ring split open by circuits and code, ~ATH and html, and she was right, you are going mad. You must be mad, to see this now. To see this only now. How everything you are and were and should have been and won't be, is decided in the end by someone else.

"Perils of being a might-have-been," says Rose, and there's something satisfied in her voice, and maybe you should have cared that she was more grimdark every day and less Light, the mad Seer in her pit of smoke, and you should run like a spider from a snake but it's too late now. "Now you understand," she says, sliding her arms fully around you, her breath warm against your neck, and you want her to bite, to infect you with the things that live in her head because this is too much for you, alone in your body, "why luck doesn't matter."

You couldn't fathom before what madness felt like. You didn't expect it to feel like the fear skittering in your abdomen, like your hopelessness at the thought that your luck and your choices were never your own and you can't even fathom the mind of the being they belong to.

Now, staring up at the darkness of the server in which your Incipisphere drifts, the glimmers of light from a story that somewhere continues without you, in the arms of a being so reasonable and yet beyond reason, you think at last you know. You just didn't expect it to be so oddly comforting.


End file.
